Estée Lauder Pink Ribbon Photo Award 2025

For its 14th edition, the competition orientate this year with a deeply human and symbolic theme: “Closer to the Heart”. Photographers are invited to take a subjective look at the disease, by telling a story: the story of Women - or much more rarely, the one of Men - who face this cancer. This has been the the aim of the Estée Lauder Companies Pink Ribbon Photo Award since its beginning in 2012, to encourage the audience for early breast cancer screening.

More than 900,000 people in France face this ordeal, one woman in eight, with an average of more than 60,000 new cases diagnosed every year.

Each image tells an intimate, subjective story about kindness, struggles and hopes “Closer to the Heart”

At a time of global political destabilization, the competition gives space to the very essence of the fight against breast cancer. A fight which, beyond the disease, is played out on the terrain of empathy, solidarity, humanist values and the unfailing support of family and loved ones, all united in a common spirit of solidarity, benevolence and hope.

Breast cancer, one of the most widespread pathologies, is a profound upheaval for sufferers and those around them. It's an upheaval that not only alters our bodies, but also our relationship with others and with the world.

Through this competition, photographers and models share an intense moment, which they offer to the audience. What emerges from these human encounters are powerful and enlightening accounts of the daily lives of sufferers, illustrating the different stages of the disease: from treatment and remission to recovery.

Each image tells a story of struggle, hope and love. A story that shows the moments of gentleness between friends and family, the gestures that reassure, the discreet smiles that sometimes hide tears. A story that tells, in a single photo, the daily reality of a sick person, alone or accompanied, faced with illness and its progression. A story that tells of collective initiatives, benevolence, support, moments of courage and determination. And dignity.

The Estée Lauder Companies Pink Ribbon Photo Award is a call for collective action to raise public awareness of the importance of breast cancer screening, prevention and research.

By exposing these images to the general audience, the aim is to break taboos, to talk freely about the disease, but also to celebrate the strength and beauty that emerge and triumph from the ordeal. Photographer Jacques Lannegrand, who signs the poster for this new edition with the portrait of his wife with which he was a winner in 2016, testifies with his true words that touch our hearts: "How does a person love herself during and after an ordeal such as breast cancer?
My wife, who had been a model, had always sat for me. Taking up this photographic activity again helped her rediscover her self-confidence and a femininity that she thought she’d forever lost. For me, this image represents a huge gift, it means even more to her, this return to a full life by starting to love herself again.”

The Estée Lauder Companies Pink Ribbon Photo Award is more than just an art competition. It's a way of conveying a message of solidarity and kindness, of changing the way we look at people with breast cancer, of highlighting the importance of early detection, but also of paying tribute to all individuals, to all stories. Because true light lies not only in what we see, but in what we feel deep down inside. Hence the title of this 14th edition: “Closer to the Heart”.